Aldea Spiritual Community

Walking Each Other Home (Part 6): The Pathless Path | Jake Haber

In the finale of our Walking Each Other Home series, we arrive at The Pathless Path—a reflection on the paradox at the heart of spirituality. What if the journey we’ve been striving so hard to navigate ultimately dissolves beneath our feet? What if the path we thought we had to figure out, earn, perfect, or secure was never something to complete, but something to release? In this message, we explore spiritual reversals found in Christianity, Taoism, and mystical traditions—the idea that losing can be finding, letting go can be gaining, and that what we are searching for may already be present.
 
Drawing from Jung’s insight into the two halves of life and the wisdom of modern mystics, we consider what it means to move from achievement to arrival, from striving to trust, from becoming somebody to simply being. The Pathless Path invites us to see our winding roads, detours, deconstructions, and doubts not as mistakes, but as uniquely ours. In the end, perhaps the real secret is not mastering the journey but relaxing into it and realizing we’ve been home all along.
 
Quotes:
“You are searching for what you already have… When you give up all searching, you find it.” — Nisargadatta Maharaj 
“Truth is a pathless land.” — J. Krishnamurti 
“Enlightenment is the end of the search.” — Adyashanti 
“This is the real secret of life—to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.” — Alan Watts 
 

Walking Each Other Home (Part 5): The Sprint & The Marathon | Jake Haber

We’re often taught that life is a sprint: move fast, win big, get somewhere as quickly as possible. But what if that mindset is quietly exhausting us, distorting our sense of meaning, and even shaping the way we approach spirituality itself? In this installment of our Walking Each Other Home series, we explore the difference between sprinting through life and learning to inhabit it as a marathon: one that is messy, painful, beautiful, and profoundly communal.
 
Drawing on wisdom from endurance running, philosophy, and spiritual traditions, this talk invites us to loosen our grip on urgency, achievement, and escape. Whether you’re feeling stuck, burned out, discouraged, or increasingly aware of the finitude of life, this message offers permission to slow down, stay in the race, and rediscover meaning right here, in the living of it.
 
Quotes:
 
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end
— Ursula K. Le Guin
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves
— Alan Watts
I realized I could run for days if I stopped worrying about how far I had to go
— Dean Karnazes
Do not disturb yourself by imagining your whole life at once
— Marcus Aurelius
It is because of death that life is so full of meaning
— Thich Nhat Hanh
Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come
— Rabindranath Tagore
 

Walking Each Other Home (Part 4): The Way Of Presence | Roger Pierce & Jake Haber

What does it really mean to walk with someone through life’s hardest moments?
 
In this conversation, Jake sits down with Roger, a member of the Aldea community whose life’s work has centered on presence in moments most of us instinctively try to fix, explain, or escape. Drawing from decades of experience as a naval officer, military chaplain, and hospice chaplain, Roger reflects on what it looks like to accompany people through grief, trauma, uncertainty, and death—not with easy answers, but with steady presence.
 
Rather than offering spiritual formulas or tidy conclusions, Roger invites us into a deeper understanding of companionship—one rooted in listening, humility, and belonging. Whether you’re caring for someone else, facing your own threshold moments, or simply wondering how to be more present in a fragmented world, this conversation offers a quiet, grounded wisdom for the walk.
 
Quotes:
 
“When we dare to stay with someone in their pain, without trying to take it away, we discover that love is stronger than suffering.”— Henri J.M. Nouwen
 
“To accompany someone in their dying is not to remove their fear, but to refuse abandonment.”
— Christina Puchalski 

Walking Each Other Home (Part 3): Further Together | Jake Haber

This week in our Walking Each Other Home series, we turn our attention from the journey itself to the people we walk it with. While it’s deeply human to want others to fix our problems or walk the road for us, real transformation happens when we learn how to walk alongside one another instead.
 
Quotes:
 
 
Martin Luther King Jr.
“All mankind is tied together; all life is interrelated, and we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of identity. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what I ought to be until I am what I ought to be - this is the interrelated structure of reality.”
Albert Camus
“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead. Walk beside me… just be my friend.” 
Paulo Freire
“No one liberates anyone else, and no one liberates themselves alone. People liberate themselves in communion.” 
Albert Schweitzer
“The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.” 
Thich Nhat Hanh
“Understanding someone else is not a matter of seeing them clearly, but of recognizing that they, like you, are a mystery.” 
Bruce Tuckman
“Storming is inevitable when people care enough to be honest.” 
Parker J. Palmer
“An authentic community is one in which we are free to bring the whole of who we are—and know that it will be received.”
 

Walking Each Other Home (Part 2): The Perilous Process | Jake Haber

Life isn’t a straight path — it’s a desert walk.
 
In this message from our Walking Each Other Home series, we explore what it means to actually engage with life rather than trying to manage, sanitize, or optimize our way through it. Growth doesn’t happen on perfectly marked trails. It happens through sunburns, scrapes, wrong turns, and moments where we realize we’re more lost than we’d like to admit.
 
We talk about the illusion of control, the pressure to look put-together, and the quiet truth that most of us are winging it more than we realize. The journey isn’t about avoiding difficulty — it’s about staying present when things get uncomfortable, inconvenient, or unclear.
 
The marks we carry — the wear, the scars, the dirt — aren’t evidence that we failed. They’re evidence that we showed up, stayed in the arena, and lived.
 
Quotes:
 
 
J. Krishnamurti
 
“If one is lost in a wood, what is the first thing one does? One stops, doesn’t one? One stops and looks around. But the more we are confused and lost in life, the more we chase around, searching, asking, demanding, begging. So the first thing is that you completely stop inwardly.”
M. Scott Peck
 
“Once you accept that life is difficult, it becomes much easier.”
 
 
John Keats
 
“(To be) capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
 
Rumi
 
 
“The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
 
Theodore Roosevelt
 
(Man in the Arena)
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
 
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe 
 
“It’s all messy: the hair, the bed, the words, the heart. Life.”

Walking Each Other Home (Part 1) | Jake Haber

To kick off our new series, Jake spent the entire message walking on a treadmill...a playful but sincere illustration of how life is a long journey. There are peaks and valleys, steep climbs and rewarding views, moments of exhaustion and bursts of clarity. This message touches on many of the themes we’ll be exploring more deeply throughout the series, making it the perfect place to begin.
 
Quotes:
“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” — Martin Luther King Jr. 
“The uphill path is often the one that shows you who you are.” — Parker J. Palmer 
“You don’t always know what you’re walking toward. Sometimes you only know you can’t stay where you are.” — David Whyte 
“We do not arrive at wisdom by standing still.” — Anne Lamott 
“God does not come to us by our staying still, but by our journeying.” — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
 

New Year, New Me | Jake Haber

The new year often carries two very different energies at the same time: hope and hesitation. Excitement and anxiety. Possibility and fear. Our first message of 2026 explores both sides honestly.
 
On one side, change is hard. It takes humility to admit where we’re stuck, where we’re tired, or where we don’t know what to do next.
 
On the other side, change is inevitable. Whether we welcome it or resist it, life moves forward. Time passes. Seasons end.
 
As we step into a new year, we’re invited to hold both truths at once: accepting ourselves exactly as we are, while remaining open to who we are becoming. We may not have clarity, certainty, or a perfect plan—but we can choose presence, grace, and courage as we cross the threshold.
 
Quotes:
 
Carl Rogers
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
 
Anne Lamott
Grace happens when we’re honest about our limits.
 
James Clear
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
 
Daniel Kahneman
Until we articulate what we want, our behavior stays reactive rather than intentional.
 
Heraclitus
No one ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and they’re not the same person.
 
John O’Donohue
For loss brings a space of emptiness into your life that opens a new place within your soul.
 
Mary Oliver
The beauty of the living thing is the immeasurable quality of its being—its fleetingness.

Christmas Eve 2025 | Jake Haber

Check out our 2025 Christmas Eve message—a reflection on the manger as a symbol of something ordinary, even beneath notice, becoming sacred because of what it holds.
 
Like us: human beings who are messy, complicated, and often mundane, and yet also infinite—capable of profound love, beauty, and truth.
 
This Christmas, our invitation to you and your family is to encounter the story not as distant history, but as a reminder of the light that shines within every one of us.

The Hidden Underbelly Of Christmas (Part 3): Sol Invictus | Jake Haber

How did we arrive at December 25 for the celebration of Xmas? What does it have to do with the solstice? 
 
Long before the celebration Christmas, cultures across the world marked the darkest night of the year as a sacred turning point. The Winter Solstice symbolized the return of the light, the assurance that the sun would rise again, and the promise that darkness never has the final word.
 
In ancient Rome, Sol Invictus—meaning “the Unconquered Sun”—celebrated this cosmic truth on December 25. As Christianity emerged, early believers didn’t simply replace this imagery; they recognized a deep resonance. The birth of Christ came to symbolize the same reality written into the cosmos itself: hope rising out of darkness, light returning when it feels most absent.
 
As we stand at the solstice and near the end of another year, this message is an invitation to look back with gratitude, to honor what carried us through the darkness, and to trust that light—quiet, persistent, and undefeated—is still rising.
 
Quotes:
 
 
Sol Invictus embodied the eternal return of light… a deity whose very nature proclaimed that darkness and disorder could never finally triumph.”
— Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price
“Christians saw in the sun’s return precisely the kind of cosmic sign that resonated with their belief in light overcoming darkness.”
— Andrew McGowan
“The imagery of the ‘unconquered sun’ became a natural metaphor for Christ as light— not a borrowing, but a recognition of the same truth about the world.”
— Thomas Talley
“The sun’s daily and annual ‘rebirths’ made it a powerful symbol of victory over darkness, of hope and renewal.”
— Dr. Steven Hijmans
“The birth of the sun at the solstice is the archetype of unconquered light—the world’s assurance that darkness is not final.”
— Joseph Campbell
“The sun is the most fitting symbol of the Self: radiant, indestructible, and triumphant over darkness.”
— Carl Jung
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
— Albert Camus
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul...
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
 
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.”
— William Ernest Henley, Invictus
 

The Hidden Underbelly of Christmas (Part 2): Secrets of Saturnalia | Jake Haber

Why is Christmas celebrated at this time of year—and what does an ancient Roman festival have to do with it?
 
In this message from our holiday series The Hidden Underbelly of Christmas, we explore Saturnalia: a fascinating Roman festival centered on time, reversal, and social inversion. For a few days each year, the rigid hierarchies of Roman society were turned upside down—masters served slaves, power was mocked, gifts were exchanged, candles were lit against the darkness, and people rehearsed a different kind of world.
 
Far from “ruining” Christmas, this history deepens it.
 
We look at how Saturn, time, cycles, and impermanence shaped the cultural soil into which the Christmas story was planted—and how both Saturnalia and the birth of Jesus point toward the same unsettling truth: the world as we know it is not fixed. Power can be reimagined. Hierarchies are constructed. What has been made can be unmade and remade.
 
This is a message about time, hope, and the courage to imagine something better—for ourselves, for our communities, and for the world.
 
Quotes:
 
The Romans instituted Saturnalia because their society was so rigidly hierarchical that it needed a ritualized moment of reversal. That alone should tell us something about our own times.
— Dr. Nadia Williams 
Saturnalia was a reminder that social hierarchies are neither natural nor inevitable. By turning the world upside down for a few days, the Romans exposed how constructed their own power structures really were.
— Mary Beard 
The Christmas story is about a God who refuses to play by the world’s rules of domination. Instead, God comes small, hidden, and vulnerable—turning power on its head.
— Richard Rohr 
Saturnalia let Romans rehearse a world that was fairer, freer, and more humane. They could imagine justice, even if they would not enact it.
— Ramsay MacMullen 
The Christmas story is the announcement that a new order is breaking in, and that it begins in the hearts of those who will dare to imagine it.
— Howard Thurman